Midrash is often spoken of as literature that fills in the gaps in the Biblical story. For instance, what does the Bible tell us about Abraham’s childhood, or for that matter, what does it tell us about why God picked Abram for the covenant?

If you said, “nothing,” that was the right answer.

If you said, “What about the story about his father Terah’s workshop?” then you are referring to a midrash from the 5th century collection Genesis Rabbah.

If you are an eager beaver and want to find books of midrash, you can do so but you may find that they are somewhat daunting. The colorful stories are embedded in sermons, ethical debates, and legal discussions. Classic rabbinical midrash took very specific literary forms which are foreign to modern readers. For a little taste of this sort of midrash, you can find Genesis Rabbah (also called Bereshit Rabbah) online.

Sometimes people refer to films and stories as “modern midrash.” It doesn’t carry the authority of the classical rabbinic midrash, but it is also an elaboration on a Biblical story. A film can include midrashic elements (see Noah and The Prince of Egypt.) Novels like The Red Tent can be built completely of the writer’s speculations about the Biblical story.

You can also do this sort of informal midrash on your own. In fact, you probably already do. Have you read a passage from the Torah and thought to yourself, “But what about….?” or “Why did he…..?” If you began to speculate about possibilities that are not actually IN the text, you were engaging in a midrashic process.

Here’s an interesting exercise: try to read a Biblical text and NOT add anything to the text. If you start filling in details, stop. If you start wondering about something, stop. Just deal with the words on the page. It’s tougher than you might think.

Midrash reflects a very human impulse. We want to understand the text, and when what’s there seems awfully skimpy, it’s natural to speculate. It’s just important to keep track of what is really IN the text and what isn’t.

There’s no clear proof one way or the other about the Exodus. There’s no record of it in Egyptian records, but then, it’s highly unflattering to the Egyptians, and no one else would have been interested. Some scholars think that it may be a conflation of several different stories which had kernels of truth: the rule of the Hyksos, the expulsion of the Hyksos by Pharaohs of the 18th and 19th dynasties, the eruption of Santorini in about 1550 BCE, etc. I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly what happened, but at this point the fact of the story is perhaps more important than its historicity.